4 ms·

Sourcetrail?

lstamour 6y ago
Yep, Sourcetrail can do that, for the languages it supports. (It has an SDK so additional languages can be added, with effort.) Give it a method, another method, and it will draw a line from point A to B (with all the functions in between) using static analysis plus you can explore before and after to see what calls what. You can even see field usage though there it can be confused sometimes, understanding varies by language. But it’s still really useful. Doesn’t yet support cross-language integrations but it has a lot of potential now being open source. It works great for individual developer use, for team use I’d want to try my hand porting it to React or the web in order to more easily share views with others, and perhaps use a central database. For now you can make Sourcetrail projects as part of a CI system to share them with other team members. In addition to Sourcetrail, I also recommend adding OpenTelemetry for distributed projects or flame graphs for less distributed ones. Some of the videos Honeycomb.io put together really highlight the value of distributed tracing, such as this one: https://youtu.be/GuIWQ-EF7YE https://youtu.be/GuIWQ-EF7YE and the OpenTelemetry Collector makes it simple to filter telemetry, route it to services or drop a majority of traces which don’t have exceptions, for example. One day I hope OpenTelemetry tracing can be baked into any language the way flame graphs tend to enjoy first-class support in Java, and that tools like Sourcetrail can be baked into IDEs such that runtime metadata is available just by hovering your mouse over modules and functions. Kind of like CodeLens shown here, but for understanding the code: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/asp-net-exceptions#diagnosing-exceptions-using-visual-studio https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/asp... Something like https://www.codestream.com/use-cases/code-documentation https://www.codestream.com/use-cases/code-documentation works as a social network and documentation hub but doesn’t necessarily bring in production telemetry or models/ontology from code (such as Lattix, but that’s specialized to code organization in a way…) Maybe Project Cortex but for source code? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/introducing-project-cortex/ba-p/966091 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in... JetBrains Space or GitHub doesn’t yet analyze code beyond dependencies/security issues/CI but might in the future. Finally, there are tools like https://backstage.io/ https://backstage.io/ which hint at a future where developers build their own infra tools for the rest of the company to use… but that hasn’t extended much into the realm of modelling, documentation or telemetry yet. Folks might be lucky if they have a hosted copy of SourceGraph right now… the future, I think, builds on all of these ideas.
- aste-risk 6y ago
  Can you use sourcetrail on properitery codebases as well? I see it's GPL and according to my understanding, it's okay to use it on properitery software as long as you don't make any modifications to the sourcetrail software itself. Are there any hidden commercial licenses before I try it out on my company's codebase?
  - lstamour 6y ago
    I’m not a lawyer but if you’re not embedding GPL code output into your code, you’re fine. Using GPL code to write or reason about code under a different license is not the same thing as having GPL software output a copy of its own GPL-licensed code, for example: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/52211/open-source-ides-released-under-gpl https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/5221... The only other risk is letting your company’s proprietary code be visible by third-parties but Sourcetrail runs locally on your computer and can run completely offline. As to Sourcetrail’s licensing— it previously had a closed license and was supported by a startup with a number of employees. It recently went open source and can be supported financially through Patreon: https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/open_source/ https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/open_source/

Sourcetrail?

Yep, Sourcetrail can do that, for the languages it supports. (It has an SDK so additional languages can be added, with effort.) Give it a method, another method, and it will draw a line from point A to B (with all the functions in between) using static analysis plus you can explore before and after to see what calls what. You can even see field usage though there it can be confused sometimes, understanding varies by language. But it’s still really useful. Doesn’t yet support cross-language integrations but it has a lot of potential now being open source. It works great for individual developer use, for team use I’d want to try my hand porting it to React or the web in order to more easily share views with others, and perhaps use a central database. For now you can make Sourcetrail projects as part of a CI system to share them with other team members. In addition to Sourcetrail, I also recommend adding OpenTelemetry for distributed projects or flame graphs for less distributed ones. Some of the videos Honeycomb.io put together really highlight the value of distributed tracing, such as this one: https://youtu.be/GuIWQ-EF7YE https://youtu.be/GuIWQ-EF7YE and the OpenTelemetry Collector makes it simple to filter telemetry, route it to services or drop a majority of traces which don’t have exceptions, for example. One day I hope OpenTelemetry tracing can be baked into any language the way flame graphs tend to enjoy first-class support in Java, and that tools like Sourcetrail can be baked into IDEs such that runtime metadata is available just by hovering your mouse over modules and functions. Kind of like CodeLens shown here, but for understanding the code: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/asp-net-exceptions#diagnosing-exceptions-using-visual-studio https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/asp... Something like https://www.codestream.com/use-cases/code-documentation https://www.codestream.com/use-cases/code-documentation works as a social network and documentation hub but doesn’t necessarily bring in production telemetry or models/ontology from code (such as Lattix, but that’s specialized to code organization in a way…) Maybe Project Cortex but for source code? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/introducing-project-cortex/ba-p/966091 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in... JetBrains Space or GitHub doesn’t yet analyze code beyond dependencies/security issues/CI but might in the future. Finally, there are tools like https://backstage.io/ https://backstage.io/ which hint at a future where developers build their own infra tools for the rest of the company to use… but that hasn’t extended much into the realm of modelling, documentation or telemetry yet. Folks might be lucky if they have a hosted copy of SourceGraph right now… the future, I think, builds on all of these ideas.

aste-risk 6y ago
Can you use sourcetrail on properitery codebases as well? I see it's GPL and according to my understanding, it's okay to use it on properitery software as long as you don't make any modifications to the sourcetrail software itself. Are there any hidden commercial licenses before I try it out on my company's codebase?
- lstamour 6y ago
  I’m not a lawyer but if you’re not embedding GPL code output into your code, you’re fine. Using GPL code to write or reason about code under a different license is not the same thing as having GPL software output a copy of its own GPL-licensed code, for example: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/52211/open-source-ides-released-under-gpl https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/5221... The only other risk is letting your company’s proprietary code be visible by third-parties but Sourcetrail runs locally on your computer and can run completely offline. As to Sourcetrail’s licensing— it previously had a closed license and was supported by a startup with a number of employees. It recently went open source and can be supported financially through Patreon: https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/open_source/ https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/open_source/